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Press release

The NLG joins 45 organizations in calling on President Obama for “a full public accounting of practices” that systematically target American Muslims, and an investigation into these abuses as detailed in an article published July 9 at The Intercept.

Approximately 200 Palestinians from the West Bank have been held for months or years by Israeli occupation forces without access to a just legal system, members of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) learned in a fact-finding delegation from May 18-24, 2014. A formal report is forthcoming, but several observations merit preliminary mention.

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) Palestine Subcommittee will attend today’s appeal hearing before the Israeli Supreme Court in the wrongful death suit of slain U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie. The NLG stands with the Corrie family and other rights groups in urging the court to rule against the Israeli government’s impunity with regard to its violations of human rights and international law.

The new report brings to light the government’s long history of covert surveillance of attorneys and their activist clients. The release also marks the launch of a new NLG Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) project that seeks to recover FBI files on individual Guild members as exposed by the 1977 case, National Lawyers Guild v. Attorney General of the United States.

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG), along with other bar associations and legal groups, expressed profound concern over the rejection of Debo Adegbile to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. In a letter to the 52 Senators who voted against the nomination, the coalition denounced the March 5 vote as detrimental to the legal system that should be protecting our fundamental rights.

As the letter states, “Rather than discussing the merits of Mr. Adebgile’s qualifications for the position, which both Republicans and Democrats have agreed are impeccable, the debate on the Senate Floor… was shaped by a smear campaign engineered by the influential Fraternal Order of Police (FOP).”

February 12, 2014, New York - The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations-USA (CAIR-USA) sent members of the House of Representatives Education and the Workforce Committee a letter urging them to oppose legislation that would deny federal funding to colleges and universities that participate in a boycott of Israeli academic institutions or scholars. According to the legislation’s sponsors, H.R. 4009 was drafted in response to the American Studies Association’s recent resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

The National Lawyers Guild and several organizations calling for human rights and for the rule of law in Palestine and Israel urge academic institutions to reaffirm their commitment to free and open campus debate.

A group of five trained and accredited election monitors from the NLG traveled to El Salvador to observe the first round of the 2014 Presidential elections. The delegates found that the recent electoral reforms supported by President Mauricio Funes facilitated a free and fair process that resulted in a transparent elections process.